On Tuesday night in Danbury, Conn., a small plane suffered engine trouble 5 miles outside of its landing at a municipal airport. With 2 miles to go, the pilot decided the plane would not make it, and released a full-plane parachute. The device ended up as the reason he and the two other passengers walked out of the roadside woods they crashed into, unharmed.

A 2001 article in The Atlantic detailed the genesis of equipping the notoriously unsafe but nonetheless common recreational planes with parachutes. As a 25-year-old in 1984, Alan Klapmeier, an experienced pilot and eventually one of the co-founders of the Connecticut plane's manufacturer, Cirrus, collided with another small plane. The crash killed the pilot of the other vehicle. But through a blend of reaction and luck, Klapmeier survived. The incident inspired him.

Over a decade later, after a couple summers of testing in the desert—featuring several intentional dives and spins by the main test pilot to deploy the parachutes—Cirrus had developed a system that would reduce the impact the plane bears to the equivalent of a fall from 10 feet. The plane, also designed to sacrifice itself, would take the brunt of the damage and likely be destroyed. The crash would undeniably rattle the passengers, but they'd be able to walk out alive.

As the Dansbury assistant fire chief said Tuesday night, after the Dansbury crash, "Obviously it worked."